Newport City Homes (NCH) today announced that with immediate effect it will be ramping up the feature-set, and widening general availability, of its powerful tenant self-serve solution, powered by OptusApp.  

“We’re delighted to be expanding the capability of our new customer app, to give residents access to additional powerful features. This includes biometric login, the ability to pay rent online, book repairs visits, report anti-social behaviour, access personal documents and sign-up for community events,” said David Johnson, Head of Communities & Wellbeing at Newport City Homes. “The app is now also on general availability in app stores, so is accessible to all our social renting customers.”   

It’s widely accepted that the average cost of a phone call in the UK social housing sector is £7 per call. The OptusApp software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution brings immediate cost efficiencies to any landlord, while also offering tenants what they want — genuine self-serve convenience and landlord accountability.  

While social housing regulation is a devolved power in Wales and other regions, many landlords are keeping a close eye on wider trends across the border. Mandatory Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) and Awaab’s Law, are nudging many landlords with legacy tenant portals to consider more powerful and flexible alternatives for self-serve. OptusApp are specialists in this area and are unique with their feature-rich SaaS offering. 

“We worked in a truly collaborative way with OptusApp; we explored the art of the possible, focusing heavily on our customer’s needs,” said Amit Tyagi, Head of Customer Experience at Newport City Homes. “Our collaboration enabled our vision to become reality. We were able to seamlessly integrate our existing Microsoft Dynamics and repairs management system together with the customer app to provide a true end-to-end automated process. This has resulted in a very powerful and flexible platform for customer self-service and engagement. We continue to work with OptusApp on envisioning further exciting new features to be added in quarter 1 of 2024, watch this space.” 

The OptusApp platform is API driven, so can easily implement a solution for any legacy on-premises or cloud-based HMS or CRM system across the entire social housing landscape.  

Gerry Kelly, CEO at OptusApp also commented that “NCH have been magnificent to work with. New features for our SaaS offering are always landlord driven, and NCH have been front-and-centre in guiding our development work. They are one of the new breed of progressive social landlords who appreciate that tenant self-serve needs to be customer centric, rather than just a system add-on. OptusApp is unique and we’re blazing a trail in social housing channel-shift. We’re delighted to be working with like-minded people at Newport City Homes.”  

 

About Newport City Homes: 

  • Newport City Homes provides homes and services to more than 20,000 residents, leaseholders and shared owners across South East Wales.  
  • We are the largest housing association in Newport, looking after 71% of the city’s housing stock.  
  • Our 2025 Strategy sets out our priorities for the next three years.  
  • In 2015 NCH was awarded the Welsh Housing Quality Standard, allowing us to build new homes to address the need for more social housing in Newport.  
  • We’re currently carrying out a large regeneration and development programme across Newport; including a multi-million-pound regeneration scheme in Ringland.  
  • For more information, please contact Communications Business Partner, Laura Day, at laura.day@newportcityhome.com or 01633 439799 

 

About OptusApp:  

OptusApp is a specialist self-serve solution provider for the social housing sector. The OptusApp product is a unique genuine native mobile app, provided as a SaaS model for landlords of all sizes. For details please contact: Gerry Kelly, gerry@optusapp.com or 0777 5816163